Fast food diet

Category: Food & Diet

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A merica is a fast-food nation, for better and for worse. Consider the typical weekday.

The alarm goes off and the family's bare feet fast_food-diet start hitting the floor immediately.Everyone's probably running a little late because they didn't get enough sleep. (Americans sleep an average of seven hours a night, down from nine hours a century ago.) Getting the kids ready for school requires a Herculean effort: brushing teeth, washing faces, and digging under the couch for overdue library books. Time for a quick bowl of cereal? Probably not. So you rush out the door with an empty stomach. Maybe you'll snatch something on the way—or just do without anything to eat until lunch. This frenetic pace doesn't let up at work. There's hardly such a thing as a lunch "hour" anymore. More likely you'll grab food at a take-out joint near the office and wolf it down on the way to the bank or some other errand. Then it's back to work until quitting time maybe five, six, or seven hours later. At that point your blood sugar is crashing and the last thing on your mind is cooking something from scratch. Ravenous and stressed-out from your day, you point the car to KFC or Wendy's or Burger King. You want something fast because you're practically starving and there's still the kids' homework to oversee, chores to do, and perhaps a game or your favorite TV show to catch before crashing into bed. Fast food is so affordable and plentiful that millions of North Americans eat it every single day—or many times a week. We now eat on average five meals a week outside the home, in addition to snacking on convenience foods. The average adult consumes three hamburgers and four orders of fries every week. On any given day, 25 percent of all people in North America eat a fast-food meal. It's just so easy to hop in the car, zip the whole family through the drive-thru, and have dinner over and done in ten or fifteen minutes. No cooking, no cleanup, no stress—with time left over for errands and maybe some TV, plus change from a twenty-dollar bill.

But there is another side to fast food, a darker side that many people are now becoming aware of "the hard way," as we doctors say. We can no longer deny that all this fast food is making us fat. It is also making us sick. I've been called to the emergency room in the middle of the night to try to save a mom or dad who has just suffered a heart attack. I know kids who are nine, ten, eleven years of age who must inject themselves with insulin shots every day because they already have adult-onset, or Type 2 diabetes—something unheard of twenty
years ago. Everywhere I look I see entire families in tragically overstuffed bodies, huffing and puffing just to carry their extra weight from the car to the sofa, to work and to school. Nearly two-thirds of America's adults are currently overweight. One-third of the adult population is obese (officially defined as being 30 pounds overweight or more). Childhood obesity has reached alarming and epidemic proportions. Our passion for high-fat, high-salt, and high-calorie fast foods has become a major threat to our health. Consider these depressing facts:

• Type 2 diabetes is three times as common today as it was forty years ago, mainly because of our increasing weight. The link between obesity and diabetes is so strong that researchers have coined a new word, "diabesity," to describe it.
• Heart disease remains the leading killer of North Americans, largely due to elevated insulin and artery inflammation, both of which are caused by diets high in sugar and refined carbohydrates, as well as saturated and trans fats— the hallmarks of most fast foods.
• Deaths from breast cancer and prostate cancer in the United States dwarf the rates in countries where fast food isn't popular. Studies show that high-fat foods fuel the growth of many tumors, acting as a kind of fertilizer.

Just about every life-threatening disease you can name, from colon cancer and liver disease to hypertension and stroke, is strongly linked to obesity. Frequent fast-food consumption, its excessive calories, makes it nearly impossible for the average person to maintain a healthy weight. Unless we make some significant changes, these health problems are only going to increase because American children are in worse shape than adults. When researchers examined the diets of teenagers at thirty-one city schools, they found that more than half ate fast food once or twice a week and took in an average of 2,192 calories a day. Those who ate fast food three or more times a week consumed an average of 2,752 calories. The normal adolescent body simply cannot process this overwhelming amount.

The excess sugar, fat, and calories they pack into their menu items are sure to trigger overweight and related diseases. Most processed foods are also loaded with artery-clogging transfatty acids and high-fructose corn syrup, both of which are literally toxic to our organs. I also got upset at school lunch programs that invite these franchises into the lunchroom because our schools' budgets have been slashed and they need the extra cash. And I would fume at the TV ads that bombard our kids with hyperclever pitches to make them crave these junky, fattening "treats."

fast_food_diet Losing weight isn't rocket science. You don't need complicated theories, group therapy, or a gym membership. The Fast Food Diet will show you how to trim a few hundred calories from every meal without eating less food or depriving yourself of the flavors you've come to love. Those reduced calories will add up to pounds lost just as quickly and surely as those extra calories have been increasing your weight. As your weight and belly go down, your energy will increase. You'll look better and feel better about yourself. Best of all, your health will improve because how you eat is the single most important factor in avoiding today's plague of degenerative diseases. What you put in your mouth determines whether you'll live long or die young. The greatest tragedy is that the medical conditions created by consuming so much are so unnecessary. If we ate just a few calories less at each meal and managed to be a bit more physically active every day, most of these health problems could be avoided or reversed. Experts have found that losing just 10 percent of our current body weight is all that it takes to turn many of these ills around and to increase our life span significantly.

Hippocrates, the first physician and the father of modern medicine, put it aptly more than two thousand years ago when he told his patients, "Let food be thy medicine."

Eing healthier food is going to be the salvation of tens of housands—if not millions—of North Americans over the next ecade. The demand for safer foods is not a fad; it's a trend. And t will grow even stronger as more people discover the rofound truth that you are what you eat. In perfect world, we'd all a much healthier and live a lot longer and better eating chemical-free organic food and less red meat, sugar, and fats. But ours, of course, is not a perfect world, so I'm offering a realistic compromise in this book that, if followed, will produce a significant improvement in your health and weight. Not everyone can afford to shop at Whole Foods or prepare healthy, home-cooked meals for their families every night. But anyone can easily learn how to make smarter choices, no matter where they eat—even in fast-food restaurants!

We are not being good role models for our children when we let ourselves get out of shape. Kids learn by imitation, and they eat and drink as we do. So save the lectures. Every good parent knows that children will follow what we do, not just what we say. We've got to lead them and love them by example.

For example, choose vinaigrette salad dressing instead of ranch for a savings of 130 calories. (Use less of the dressing and you save even more calories.) Order seltzer with lemon instead of a sweet soda, and you save 310 calories. Forget mayonnaise and special sauces, and you can save up to 170 calories per sandwich.

"Shave 250 calories per day from your food intake and walk a mile, and the result is a deficit of 500 calories daily or about a pound of weight loss in a week. What could be easier than that?" says Sinatra.

If you consistently follow his plan, you could drop around 50 pounds in a year.

And you won't be hungry, according to the author. By making smart choices, dieters can have their cake and eat it, too.

"Substitute a grilled chicken sandwich on a whole-grain roll, topped with lettuce and tomato, without the mayo, and you have a satisfying sandwich with fewer calories than the super burger."

It might be hard to imagine losing weight on a diet chock-full of fast food. But look at Jared, star of the Subway commercials and a role model for fast-food weight loss.

For best results, use The Fast Food Diet plan to make the best choices at fast-food restaurants, and supplement with healthy meals at home.

"The secret to making any diet work is sticking with it and making compromises that will add up to weight loss. Use this guide to navigate the choices at fast food restaurants, be very selective, and it will trim calories."

Need some incentive? Keep in mind that not only will weight loss make you feel better about how you look, but, more importantly, can improve your health by reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, certain forms of cancer, and other chronic diseases.

Disclaimer: This website is for information purposes only. By providing the information contained herein we are not diagnosing, treating, curing, mitigating, or preventing any type of disease or medical condition. Before beginning any type of natural, integrative or conventional treatment regime, it is advisible to seek the advice of a licensed healthcare professional.